The Ice Cream Girls (7 page)

‘Right, so where are you going? The Tube station’s nowhere near here.’

‘Oh, that – I’m lost. I’ve been wandering around for ages. My car’s parked near here somewhere. Well, I think it is.’

‘How about this for a plan?’ he said, smiling as though I was one sandwich short of a picnic, but quite liking it. ‘I help you find your car, you drive us to your sister’s and then we go for a drink afterwards?’

‘It’ll be quite late.’

‘Is that a no?’

‘I did not say the word “no”. Nor did I imply it. I just suspect we’re going to get to my sister’s house and you’ll go, “Oh, it’s a bit late for a drink, how about we just go back to yours?”’

‘Do you want to know the tragedy of this situation?’

‘Yes.’

‘That never occurred to me. I
really
wish it had, but it didn’t. I thought it’d be nice to do something together. I live and work just a bit beyond Bethnal Green, so I could go on afterwards, but damn it, I can’t believe I didn’t think of trying to get into your place. You’d make a good man, you know?’

‘Why Ewan, you say the nicest things.’

‘Thank you, Serena. So, is it a goer?’ He remembered my name. After all these years, he remembered my name – there was something special about that.

‘I suppose so.’

‘Right, so what road did you leave the car on?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘You can’t remember.’

‘No, my memory’s a bit fuzzy, all over the place.’

‘Really, wow. Think I lucked out there, most women I know are elephants – never forget, even the smallest transgression. If you’ve got a fuzzy memory, I think we’re really going to get along.’

‘Yeah, don’t bank on it, mate.’

‘Were there any distinguishing marks about the road? Anything, anything at all?’

‘Not that I can remember. Except, I think there was a blue house on the road. Although I might have just walked past a blue house. No, no, I think there definitely was.’

‘Blue house, right. I know exactly where your car is. Come on, follow me.’ He turned in the direction I had just come from and started striding down the road. I didn’t have too much trouble catching and keeping up with him.

‘If you don’t live or work around here, what are you doing here?’ I asked, as we turned the corner I had just navigated to get on to this street.

‘Ah, well, I was meeting someone for a drink. A girl. A friend of one of the nurses at the hospital. This nurse has been trying to set us up for ages. She was convinced we would get on.’

‘And you didn’t?’

‘Well, I thought things were going OK, until she excused herself to go to the loo. She didn’t even go in the direction of the loos, she went to the foyer and picked up the payphone. I sat there, watching her. She speaks to someone for a few minutes, laughing, joking, comes back, sits down. Five minutes later, the restaurant phone rings and the manager comes to tell her she’s got a call. She goes to the phone, comes back and deadpan says, “Something’s come up, I have to go.” I ask her what’s come up and she just looks at me, all startled because she obviously wasn’t expecting me to ask. She just shrugs and goes, “I don’t know, something” and off she trots. Leaving me with two half-eaten meals, an empty bottle of wine and the bill. And of course, all the people at the nearby tables have heard this and are looking at me.’

I burst out laughing. I had to stop in the street and hold my sides I was laughing so much. ‘That’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard,’ I managed between breathy laughs. ‘How boring must you be?’

‘I know, that’s what I’ve been thinking all this while. She’d told her friend she thought I was the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen. So now, she’s got an awful date story to tell, with me as the bad date. Me. She’ll tell people I’m nice to look at but dull. How is that fair?’

I started on a fresh crop of laughs.

‘She wasn’t exactly a barrel of fun, either, but you don’t see me dumping her, do you?’

‘That isn’t the worst part, you know, Ewan,’ I said to him, still laughing but walking while I did it.

‘It isn’t? What could be worse than that?’

‘At some point, you’re going to hear your story again but it’ll be a million times worse as it’s told back to you. Your bad date stories – being told by someone else – always come back to haunt you.’

‘Ah, great, thanks for that.’

‘No problem.’

‘You have to promise to tell me if I become boring though, OK? Don’t just dump me at the table and leave – tell me I’m being boring.’

‘You could never be boring.’

‘I’m glad you think so,’ he said as we came to a road where I could see LC, my white automatic Micra. (LC was short for Little Car.)

After I dropped the material off at Medina’s, he and I had a quick drink before closing time because he had to rush to get his train back to Essex.

‘It’s Evan, by the way,’ he said as he brushed a kiss on my cheek. ‘I’m Evan, not Ewan.’

‘But I’ve been calling you Ewan all night. Why didn’t you say?’

‘I’ve already had one woman walk out on me tonight, I didn’t need to ruin things with another woman.’

‘OK,
Evan,
I’m sorry I got your name wrong. But I had a fabulous time and you’re not boring at all.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, and cupped my chin in his hand, then leant towards me and kissed the end of my nose. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

‘Yeah.’

As I lay in bed that night, I knew it was going to work out with Evan. Fate had brought us back together. And he was gentle. Good looking, nice, funny, but also gentle. I had teased him and he hadn’t slapped me in return. He hadn’t shouted at me or sulked or made me feel afraid. People I knew often told me that was what men were really like – my sisters told me, too, but I never completely believed them. How could I, when the only man I knew in that way was not like that? He was not tolerant, he was not gentle, he had a very limited sense of humour.

Evan wasn’t like
him
. Even when I got his name wrong he didn’t seem to mind. He could laugh at himself, he could laugh at me, he seemed like one of the gentlest men I’d ever met. That was why my conscience was unsettled. My conscience knew that with a gentle man that Fate had returned to me, I could probably be happy.

With a gentle man, I could start to dig my way out of the prison I had been living in.

Verity is quiet and nervy the whole drive home. Her eyes keep looking in the rear-view mirror and the wing mirror and out the back window just to be sure there aren’t any more police around. That’s the problem with age: you start to see more things to worry about. If Conrad had been in the car, he would have thought it was cool to be stopped by a police officer, it wouldn’t occur to him until it actually happened that it could end with me being thrown in prison. And even then he wouldn’t take it that seriously until he was told that he wouldn’t be seeing me at home again for a very long time. Verity, unfortunately, knows what the police mean and she can also decipher the nuances of conversation. Which is why Evan and I now row – mostly – in the car when the kids have gone to sleep. Even sarcasm upsets her because she can tell there’s something going on.

As soon as we get home, she kicks off her trainers and leaves them scattered under the coat rack, wrenches off her burgundy denim jacket and slings it on top of the trainers and runs upstairs. Probably to write in her diary, maybe to cry, definitely to find an outlet for what happened. I would go after her if I didn’t suspect it would cause more harm than good. I don’t know what to say to her that would make her feel any better about what happened.

Con and Evan are in the kitchen, eating ice cream over the island.

‘I can’t believe you eat that stuff,’ I say to Evan, feeling my stomach turn as I watch the white mounds on their cones slowly disintegrate. ‘It’s basically just sugar and lard.’

‘Oh yes, I know,’ he says.

‘I can’t believe you let my children eat it, either,’ I say. The sight of it, right now, after what just happened is stomachwrenchingly disgusting.

‘It’s the best thing in the world,’ Evan says, through a mouthful of white filth. I want so much to slap it out of his hand, snatch Con’s away and dump them both in the bin. Out of sight, out of mind.

‘I’m going to wash my hands,’ I say, and turn to leave the kitchen.

‘Hang on, where’s Verity?’

‘Upstairs,’ I say. I had been hoping to break the news to him gently but now . . .

‘Did you two have a row?’ Evan asks, his voice full of concern, even though he only has eyes for the ice cream in his hand. Watching it ooze and melt all over their hands makes me want to vomit.

‘No, but she is a bit upset.’

‘Why? What happened? Hideous bridesmaid dress?’

‘No . . . On the way back we . . . kind of . . . were stopped by the police.’

‘You were
what
?’ he asks, finally able to tear his attention away from the confection in his hand.

Con’s eyes widen in awe. ‘Wow,’ he breathes.

‘Apparently I was speeding,’ I say. ‘I was overtaking and didn’t slow down soon enough. So the police car that seemed to appear from nowhere pulled us over. And Vee got upset because he said he could take me down to the station or breathalyse me.’

‘
You
who barely makes it over thirty, even in a fifty zone, were speeding? Now that’s one for the record books. Poor kid must have been terrified. I’ll go see if she’s all right.’ He stands up and comes towards me, still holding that
thing
in his hand. ‘Here,’ he shoves it into my hand, ‘hold this.’

I stare at it: the feel of it under my fingers, the sweet vanilla smell of it in my nostrils is turning my stomach. ‘I haven’t washed my hands,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll have to bin this now, you can’t eat it.’

‘Don’t you dare, woman!’ he calls from the foot of the stairs. ‘Con, you’re in charge – if she tries to bin it, come and get me.’

‘OK, Dad,’ Con calls back.

Any second I’m going to throw up on it. I’m going to cover it in bile and lunch’s Spanish omelette, and then he definitely won’t be able to eat it.

‘Here,’ I say, thrusting it at my son, ‘you look after it for your dad, I really need to wash my hands.’

I rush to the sink, turn the hot water tap on full, hoping for enough stored hot water to cleanse away the stickiness it has slicked on my hands, and the near-invisible stain it has left upon my skin.

‘What did the handcuffs feel like, Mum?’ Conrad asks through a mouthful of ice cream.

I stop for a minute, wanting to ask him what he knows, who told him that I’d ever had handcuffs linked around my wrists – then I remember what he means. ‘He didn’t handcuff me, sweetheart,’ I say, scrubbing again and again at my hands.

‘Oh. What’s it like in a police car?’

It’s like being buried alive, and knowing you’re being driven to a place where they’ll bury you alive again.
‘He didn’t put me in a police car.’

‘Oh. Did he at least talk on his radio thingy about you?’

Not while I was there. I’ll bet he’ll mention it to a few others, though. I’ll bet they’ll all be on the look out for my car after this.
‘No, love. But it did crackle a bit.’

‘Oh.’ My eight-year-old is deflated, disappointed – for one moment in time he thought I was exciting, that he’d have a good story to tell his friends about his boring mum suddenly becoming interesting. I am not. I am dull and I am proud of that fact.

I am still trying to get the ice cream off my hands. Physically it is gone, but it is still there in other ways, staining my flesh in the same way that blood does by hiding down in the little ridges of the skin.

I often think that my hands will never be clean, that no matter how long I wash them for they’ll always look how they did in the continuous reflection I saw in the bridal shop: they’ll always be unclean and drip-drip-dripping in
his
blood.

serena

History is the most boring subject on earth.
On earth
.

It has nothing to do with me and I really wish I didn’t have to do this lesson. ‘
Srrenna, Srrenna
,’ Veronica Bell, who sat behind me in History, kept calling at me under her breath. She wasn’t even saying my name properly. She wanted to me to take the note she’d written out of her hand and give it to Liam Ruthers who sat in front of me. I wasn’t going to do it. I wasn’t going to get involved in her trying to get Liam to notice her. I knew I’d get caught, and end up in detention or something. I’d seen it happen to other girls who’d tried to help Veronica. The teacher always got the note, read it out to the class, Veronica pretended she knew nothing about it and the note-passer got detention. That wasn’t happening to me. Especially not in this class. Veronica didn’t even like me. Most of the time she ignored me or called me names behind my back: like maps – spam backwards – because, according to her, I had a big, shiny forehead that was just begging to have someone hit while they yelled ‘SPAM’ in my face. She wouldn’t dare try it, though. She wasn’t sure what I’d do in return. She was all talk when I wasn’t there, but nothing to my face. And despite all that, she wanted me to help her to get Liam to go out with her.

I stared down at the page in front of me, shutting out Veronica’s hisses. I was so bored I could yawn. I hated this classroom as well. It was smaller than the others, the windows weren’t as large and Sir never opened them, so we all seemed to be crammed in here, and the boys smelt. They all wore their dads’ aftershave even though most of them didn’t shave. And most of them kept a can of BO basher in their lockers so they could have a quick spray between classes. ‘Girls like boys to smell nice,’ that’s what Medina told me when I asked her why they did it. The girls were just as bad with their Yardley and Charlie, but the boys sprayed on loads and loads and I always felt sick afterwards.

‘Miss Gorringe, perhaps you would care to tell the class why policemen are sometimes called Bobbies?’ asked the new History teacher, out of the blue. He wasn’t like other teachers. He was only a little bit older than us. And all the girls said he should be a film star because he was good looking. His class was the worst for the smells: all the girls rushed to their lockers to spray on perfume before his class and the braver ones put on make-up and wore their jewellery, despite it being forbidden. I’d even seen Veronica pull up her skirt so her legs above her knees were on show.